Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday October 06, 2010 @11:25PM
from the say-hi-to-marvin dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Since the atmospheric blanket of Mars is fast disappearing, NASA is planning a mission to Mars in 2013 to study the Red Planet further. The $400-million plus project named the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) will investigate how Mars lost most of its atmosphere. This will be critical in understanding whether there has been life there or not."

You know, he may be a few crackers short in his chili but that makes me think of something I've been wondering for awhile: Why are we not seriously trying to Terraform Mars? The first country to terraform Mars is gonna have their own planet full of resources to rule, it is the closest and by far the easiest to Terraform (has water, air, decent gravity, etc) and I'm sure even if we made it a one way trip there would be tons of hearty folks that would give their left nut to go. so why not send one ship with s

Because we do not have the capability to do so, and aren't likely to in the foreseeable future. Read up on some of the non-fictional assessments of what making Mars livable would entail.

When and if we do get such capabilities, terraforming will still take a very, very long time. A realistic estimate is at least a century of continuous effort to put a breathable atmosphere in place, and frankly, that's optimistic. We'd need infrastructure in the rest of the solar system in place first, to supply the resources needed, specifically to thicken the Martian atmosphere, add a liquid hydrosphere and make the introduction of life possible. I doubt we can get that infrastructure in place from where we are now without many decades and countless trillions devoted to doing so, and that isn't even stage one of the terraforming process, it's stage zero.

Put another way, with the resources it would take to make Mars habitable, we could easily fix most of our current problems here on Earth, regarding climate, resource scarcity, energy and ecology. After all, it's the same problems in both cases. And we'll never, ever be able to move a significant portion of our population to Mars even if the planet could support life; a spacecraft carrying a thousand colonists would be an amazing feat of engineering, and ten rounds trips would move less than a hundred thousandth of the current world population.

I agree, I think making a magnetosphere to protect any atmosphere you manufacture might also be classed as “a bit fucking hard”.:)
But it is a good question. How to you get a planets core moving again?

You make a big ring surrounding the planet, and when it is completed you can remove the support pillars so that it floats. Then maybe you could make a transformer by winding a conductor around it...
Mars is a good candidate because you don't have as much terrain sticking up in the air.

100 years is nothing of course. If the space race had not been about a dick size contest between two political powers but about real scientific progress those rain makers might have been pumping out gases on mars for almost half of that period by now. To a single person it might seem a daunting proposition to put effort into something which is not going to pay of before he or she is dead or gone but nevertheless this is done time and time again - just ask any middle-aged forest owner if he expects to be aro

Anyway, having some colonists on mars, and terraforming it would ensure that no single catastrophic event could kill all humanity. With the exception of blewing up whole solar system of course:)

Then we would be allowed to fuck up one planet and learn from mistakes.For example I doubt that mars colonists would burn carbon based fuel in it's atmosphere.. There's simply none of it there. So, colonization would initially be cleaner.

Leftists will throw every excuse they can think of to dissuade people from pursuing this, because they derive their power from perpetuating scarcity and fragile earth crisis mongering.

Persuing grand projects of space travel do exactly that, they waste resources and impact our environment, and for what? To look at air? Last I knew, you could study atmospheres in detail from light years away just by looking at their light. I smell pork, and there's another wasteful thing no matter who's chucking it.

You can't do this science from the ground. You can get an idea of composition and density from spectrographic data, but the noise is too high to capture any of the dynamic properties. The main purpose of MAVEN is to study atmosphere evolution, which involves the rate at which volatiles are leaving the atmosphere, and how those rates relate to geography and the solar cycle. And its not just these things that we don't know -- its as basic as what the density is at a given region. Previous Mars missions ha

We haven't terraformed Mars because the exact way to get it done has not been predicted, yet.

You should grab any hard-sci fi anthology on terraforming and/or Mars and look into it. Some fairly serious scientists write some of these short stories and put a lot of truly scientific effort into it. One guy who works somewhere in the space-related fields wrote a story detailing how it would be more or less truly impossible to build Mars an atmosphere conducive to human life for reasons related to gravity.

We haven't terraformed Mars because the exact way to get it done has not been predicted, yet.

You should grab any hard-sci fi anthology on terraforming and/or Mars and look into it....

While I don't want to dissuade you from reading science fiction about terraforming, I will point out that science fiction really is not the best way to learn about real science. We science fiction writers make stuff up in order to make a good plot. In particular, SF writers often make up magical technology, in order to make terraforming happen at a rate faster than geological time scales.

Best way to learn about terraforming would be to read Martyn Fogg's book Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environmen

The first country to terraform mars doesn't own it. The country with the biggest guns owns it.

As to the reason why we haven't tried.1) land on earth is still relatively cheap. Maybe when the population on earth is 30 billion, and we are suffering the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange, all fish is vat cloned because oceans are too polluted then maybe the economics is different.

2) Until we get a space elevator it is prohibitively expensive to put things into even geo transfer orbit much less shooting

You joke, but last night on Bad Universe on the Discovery channel, Phil Plait was talking about the Martian meteorite that was found in the Antarctic. They showed an electron microscope scan of a region that looked like a cell undergoing mitosis. If this is really Martian life, it would be older than any life on Earth. In fact, it would be possible that life originated on Mars and seeded Earth. We could all really be Martians! (Yes, all speculative at this point, but fun to think about.)

I remember reading a paper a few years back on what it would take to create an artificial magnetic field on earth to replace our own if it were ever to become necessary.

Basically a dozen superconducting rings around the planet spaced evenly between latitudes would be all that would be needed.

Each ring requires about 1GW -- the output of a nuclear reactor to power (mostly cooling to keep below transistion temperature). On earth it's obviously a lot of work from an engineering perspective but not impossible t

It's for these sort of reasons that I'm very sceptical about making large scale use of geothermal energy. If we eventually start solidifying magma as a result of the heat extraction and the earth loses its magnetic field as a result, say goodbye to the nice atmosphere and radiation protection we have now.

Right, and tidal plants stop the tide.I think you are going across some orders of magnitude here.

Although it was previously thought that a tidally locked planet (or one without a magnetic field) would have their atmosphere taken away, studies have shown that without the solar storm would induce a magnetic field protecting the atmosphere within one hour.

Earth generates its heat through radioactive decay of elements like U-238. That decay will happen whether we use the energy or not. The only question is how much we route the heat flow through our systems and how much of it goes to driving volcanoes and plate tectonics, as far as I can see. Earth produces about 2-3 times as much energy as we (as a civilization) use, so if we got all of our energy from geothermal, we'd be in trouble. However, the Earth also receives about (let's

Fast disappearing ? I think it has a few billion years to go, 100 million years would be a low estimate. Heck, Phobos will crash in only a few million years, and even that.is considerably longer than NASA's time horizon

From "Augustine's Laws," written a few decades ago...
"The Defense Marketing Survey has stated that it has compiled a list of over one million acronyms which are in common usage in defense matters alone. These acronyms consist principally of 'words' made up of five or fewer letters. Since the number of five-letter (or less) acronyms that can be formed with the English alphabet is no more than about 14 million, it can be seen that nearly 10 percent of all possible reasonable acronyms have already been used

They are helpful though. Maven pays my bills right now, and i would feel incredibly goofy calling it MAVEM or MAO (mars atmosphere orbiter) during our discussions. This one doesn't feel especially contrived, more like they came up with a name and found an easily said acronym that fit with it. Also a good name makes sure it doesn't face trouble in congress or the media.

That and to be honest I didn't really notice that it didn't match up until now, even though I've been working on it for three months...

They're going to Mars to study AIR? That's ridiculous! Thank Lord Jesus we have the teabaggers to put a stop to this. It's ridiculous that they would go to Mars to study air. Everyone knows that Mars doesn't exist. What a waste of taxpayer money. It's a socialism and Muslim waste of money. NASA is probably just doing it to make Barack Obama look good. What next? Will they build a mosque on Mars too? Has Glen Beck cried about this outrage yet?